Questions to Ask Aristotle
Twenty questions you would put to Aristotle if you had an hour with him, covering the good life, habit and character, friendship, politics, the things he studied by observation, and the places later readers think he went wrong.
20 questions, each with the reason to ask it · includes a conversation guide
The questions
Open any question to see why it works.
- 1
If you had to say what a good life is in one sentence, what would it be?
He would resist the compression, and the resistance is the lesson. His term, eudaimonia, is closer to a life going well over its whole length than to feeling good on a Tuesday, which is why he says you cannot judge one in an afternoon.
- 2
Can a person be happy on the day everything goes wrong?
This presses on the least comfortable part of his ethics: he does not claim virtue makes you immune to fortune. Health, money, friends and luck all affect whether a life goes well, which sets him against anyone selling contentment as purely internal.
- 3
You say we become just by doing just acts. But how do we do the first one, before we are just?
The oldest objection to his account of habit, and it has never been fully settled. Watch for whether the answer leans on imitation, on being raised well, or on the difference between doing what a just person does and doing it as a just person would.
- 4
Where exactly is the mean between cowardice and recklessness, and who decides?
The doctrine of the mean is routinely misread as moderation or as splitting the difference. His mean is relative to the person and the situation, which means it cannot be calculated in advance, only judged, and that concedes more to circumstance than most readers notice.
- 5
Why do we do what we know is bad for us?
His name for this is akrasia, weakness of will, and he takes it seriously as a real state rather than a failure of knowledge. Ask whether the person knew in the moment or only in general, because that distinction is where his answer lives.
- 6
Which of Plato's ideas did you keep after you rejected the rest?
He studied under Plato for roughly twenty years and then broke with him over whether Forms exist apart from things. Asking what survived the break is more interesting than asking why he left, and it exposes how much of the framework he never abandoned.
- 7
How much of your work came from actually going and looking?
Large parts of his surviving writing are biological: descriptions of animals, their parts, how they reproduce and move. He got things wrong, but the method of collecting observations first is the part later science kept, and he is worth asking about it directly.
- 8
When you say everything has four causes, what does that get you that one cause does not?
Material, formal, efficient and final causes are usually taught as a list to memorize. The live question is what is lost when later thinkers keep only the efficient cause, and whether purpose can be dropped from an explanation of a living thing.
- 9
What is the difference between a friend you enjoy and a friend you would die for?
He sorts friendship into three kinds, based on utility, on pleasure, and on character, and only the third is stable, because the first two dissolve when the use or the pleasure does. Most people recognize their own friendships in the ranking and dislike where some of them land.
- 10
Can a good person stay good outside a city?
His claim that a human being is a political animal is not a remark about voting. It is the position that the virtues need other people to be practiced on at all, which makes solitary goodness close to incoherent on his account.
- 11
What can a person of practical wisdom do that someone who has memorized every rule cannot?
Phronesis is the capacity to see what this situation calls for, and he treats it as something acquired by experience rather than instruction. The test question is what a wise person does when two rules point in opposite directions.
- 12
What does tragedy do to an audience that an argument cannot?
His account of catharsis in the Poetics has been argued over for centuries because he says so little about it. Push on whether the effect is purging an emotion, clarifying it, or training it, since those are very different claims about why watching suffering is good for us.
- 13
Is rhetoric a tool for truth or a weapon against it?
He wrote a systematic treatment of persuasion while holding that truth has a natural advantage in argument, which is either optimistic or untested depending on your century. Ask what he would say about persuasion that works precisely because it is not examined.
- 14
What are we working for, if the point is not the work?
His word scholē, the root of school, means leisure in the sense of time free for its own use rather than rest for the sake of more labor. It is one of the sharpest challenges he poses to a culture that treats busyness as evidence of a life going well.
- 15
Is contemplation really the highest life, or the one that happens to flatter philosophers?
He ranks the contemplative life above the active one, and the obvious suspicion is self-interest. A serious answer has to explain why a life almost nobody can afford counts as the best one, and whether the political life is second place or something else entirely.
- 16
You were wrong about slaves and about women. What would have changed your mind?
Ask it plainly rather than apologetically. He defended natural slavery and treated women as subordinate, and both positions were contested in his own time. The useful question is what evidence his own method should have required of him and why he did not demand it.
- 17
What did Alexander take from you, and what did he ignore?
He tutored Alexander as a boy, which is the most famous fact about him and the least informative. The real question is what he thinks an education can and cannot do to someone who ends up with unlimited power.
- 18
If everything has a function, what is a human being for?
His argument moves from what is distinctive about us, reasoning, to what our excellence must consist in. The objection worth putting to him is whether being distinctive at something makes it your purpose, since we are also uniquely good at cruelty.
- 19
What would you most want to see from the two thousand years after you?
A question that tells you what someone thinks was unfinished. In his case the honest candidates are biology, since he collected specimens without a microscope, and the fate of the small city-state, since his politics assumes one.
- 20
Which of your books would you burn?
Much of what survives reads like lecture notes rather than finished work, and much of what he polished for publication is lost. Ending here invites the most human answer available: what he would not have wanted read at all.
Using these questions
Practical guidance for the conversation itself.
Words that trip people up
Words that trip people up
- Eudaimonia is usually translated as happiness, which misleads. Flourishing, or a life going well as a whole, is closer, and it is something you can be wrong about in the moment.
- Virtue translates arete, which means excellence of any kind. A knife has arete when it cuts well, so the word carries less moral solemnity than it does in English.
- The mean is not the average and not moderation. It is the right amount for this person in this situation, which is why he says it takes judgment rather than arithmetic.
- Political animal refers to the polis, a small self-governing city. It is a claim about needing a shared life with others, not a claim about government.
- Contemplation, theoria, means sustained attention to what is true rather than quiet reflection on your feelings.
Running this in a class or a group
Running this in a class or a group
Answer as yourselves before you answer as him
Take a question such as the one on friendship and have everyone sort their own before anyone quotes a text. The categories land harder when people have already put a real name in the wrong bucket.
Make someone argue the objection
Several of these questions are standing criticisms rather than curiosities, particularly the ones on habit, on contemplation, and on slavery. Assign someone to press them properly, or the discussion becomes an appreciation.
Keep the biology in the room
Groups tend to treat him as an ethicist alone. Spending ten minutes on how he described animals changes how the ethics reads, because the same habit of looking first runs through both.
If you are writing the dialogue yourself
If you are writing the dialogue yourself
- Let him ask you what you mean by your terms before he answers. He does it constantly, and it is the most recognizable thing about how he argues.
- Have him start from what people commonly say and then test it, rather than from a principle. That order is his method.
- Give him room to say a question is badly formed. Refusing the premise is a real move, not a dodge.
- Resist making him serene. The writing is dry, dogged and often impatient, not soothing.
- Do not let him predict the future. The interesting version of the conversation is the one where he is genuinely surprised by what you tell him.